A runner accused of cheating in the London Marathon by jumping over a barrier to take a short cut has denied the claims against him.

Jason
Scotland-Williams, 34, achieved a “miracle” time and finished the second half
of the race just three minutes shy of the world record for a half-marathon,
acing Olympic champion Mo Farah’s time and placing him in the top six per cent
of athletes on the day.

He triumphantly crossed
the finish line with a time of 3:08:47, putting Mr Scotland-Williams in a
highly impressive 2,162nd place.

Online forums
have been awash with speculation that the model from West London could have
jumped over a barrier at the half-way point on Tower Bridge and re-joined the
race in its latter stretches – slashing 10 miles off the route.

But Mr
Scotland-Williams, who was running his sixth London marathon for deaf-blind
charity Sense, last night said he had “done nothing wrong”.

"I’m a
personal trainer. I train every day, seven days a week, for the past seven
years. Nobody thinks maybe I just trained hard”.

The secret to his
remarkable time? He claims he paced himself through the first half of the race
and “let himself go” in a sprint to the finish.

He added: “All
along the route are stewards and people watching. There’s no way you can
cheat”.

A spokesman for
the London Marathon said that race organisers were holding at investigation
into Mr Scotland-Williams, who ran the race in a sense bib and a V for Vendetta mask.

And a
representative from Sense charity said they would be “very disappointed” if the
allegations against Mr Scotland-Williams were true.

The mystery
echoes a controversy from four years ago, when it emerged that a runner thought
to have recorded the fastest time for a pensioner in the London event had taken
a 10 mile short cut.